On Thin Ice

What a rather good series this turned out to be.  Despite my suspicion that the three Brits, James Cracknell, Ben Fogle and Dr Ed Coats were not going to see the end of the race via their own amazing efforts, they did just that.

The one downside of the show was the total focus on the British team.  There were other teams in the race and we have no real clue how any of them did beyond the Norwegian army team.

We only know how the Norwegian’s did to the extent that they beat the Brits, who came in an amazing second place.

Thankfully there was not a lot of gum flapping about global warming which so often blights these programs nowadays and often appears to be the latest excuse by which to hang an arctic jolly.

There is a long history of “science” being the cover for arctic wanderings.

The three blubbing brits (they all had a good cry in this episode at one time or another) pushed themselves beyond expected limits to reach the finish.

James Cracknell pushed himself beyond medical limits it seemed at the time and should be more thankful than he appeared to be that Dr Ed Coats was there to minister to him.

Cracknell (Olympic rowing hero, gold medallist) did not come out of the last two episodes very well.  Clearly very driven he was unsympathetic towards his team-mates and took some quite amazing risks.  It put the team under more stress than was needed and upset the other two.

Apart from taking significant risks with his health, he also decided to go across a crevice field un-roped.  Ben an Ed could not get the rope on fast enough as James skied off.

How much James’s sheer will to win kept the team going and how much it hampered their efforts to complete is difficult to say.  Certainly James was the most ill when finishing.  Asthma, Pneumonia in one lung, feet blistered to ribbons and infected, frostbitten finger were just the most obvious physical ailments.

The other two by contrast seemed largely just sick of him most of the time.

Cracknell failed to look after himself and by extension failed to look after his team.  He was simply driven to win a race that they had lost pretty much the moment the Norwegian’s glided past them early in the race.

The driven, head down bully and shove approach did get him to the Pole, but it was at a considerable cost.  The Norwegians by contrast seemed perfectly at home in what amounts to their natural habitat.

Ben did a piece to camera concerning James’s frostbitten finger.  In Britain it is some sort of badge of honour, a demonstration of the hardships endured when you come back frostbitten to hell facing possible amputation.   In Norway you are just considered an idiot.  Shortly afterwards Ben was rubbing unctuous  stuff into the end of his frostbitten nose.

Dr Ed Coats did every step of the way with them, helped James’s with his various ailments and remained by and large in good spirits it seemed.  His rewards for doing so are largely what he takes away from the experience.  Which is fortunate because most of the time he barely gets a mention in the TV write-ups and seemed to have very much been the spare wheel in terms of TV time he got.  James’s spent most of the camera time complaining about the good Doctors poor attitude while he himself either waved his rotting feet in his face for patching up, or was slumped over his ski-poles.

Essentially this seemed to be the usual English amateur polar venture that by sheer willpower and a good deal of good fortune got to the Pole in second place.  The potential for suffering is why we watched.

What did I learn?

I liked Ben Fogle more than I thought.

Celebrity, however mundane appears to be more significant than achievement, however great.  Evidence being the bizarre focus on two of the three people in the tent.

Determination to succeed is more important than the physical attributes to succeed.  Evidence of this being the highly driven Cracknell basically drove himself into the ground.  Whereas the rather less prepared Fogle (flesh eating disease and laying in bed) and Coats, a late arrival to the team, appeared to do rather much better.

To extend this, “bully and shove” gets you part of the way there, your feet get you the rest.  Everyone should realise, looking after your feet (and by extension the rest of you) is the way you get to your goals.  Pushing yourself to your limits is recipe for fail-sauce.  In one of the episodes an ex-SAS chap training them pointed this out, making special effort to point it out to Cracknell.

Being quick to find fault in others is a fault in oneself.  It also fails serves to highlight the fact you are probably making more mistakes than most.  It fractures rather than builds the team and weakens everything as a result.

Me, I loved watching every moment and now looking forward to reading the book, which hopefully will fill in some of the blanks on the map.

On Thin Ice.

BBC 2, Sunday 21:00

Polar regions have a fascination for me.  The environment is so bleak and alien it's difficult not be fascinated.  Add to that a layer of British boys own adventure from the heroic age of exploration and it's all over bar the shouting for me.

So I was anticipating greatly this series charting the efforts of Ben Fogle and James Cracknell in the first ever race to the Pole.

I am not a fan of celebrity adventurers and when these two suggested Gordon Ramsey as their 3rd team member the program looked like it was heading South a hell of a lot faster than expected.

Fortunately the foul mouthed boiler of eggs was in far too much of a social whirl to plod to the pole (only 1 day off that year, which I can now reveal is not so he can attend my birthday).  There might have been some amusement in watching him suffer, but unless he regularly fell through the ice it would not have been compensation enough.

As the episodes progressed the sheer misfortune of Ben Fogle unfolded in front of us.

Now I have always considered this chap a bit too foppish but that is to do the fellow serious dis-service.  He is made of British steel in an old fashioned way.

Flesh eating diseases seemed like a pretty major blow and the cure was only marginally less likely to kill him than the disease.  Missing out on vital training the chap kept his chin up, even if there is a distinct lack of stiff upper lip about him, Ben blubbing seems to be a stock feature of his pieces to camera.

Then his wife miscarried.  Devastating stuff really, but Ben kept his eyes on the goal originally set.

He clearly must have had serious misgivings and doubts about this venture, its not a place to go underprepared or with too many thoughts elsewhere but the team must have been relying on him to some extent to keep his end up, and so he has.

At the end of Episode 4 the teams have yet to actually get to the start line.

Call me a cynic but there is not a lot of the series left for our lads to get to the Pole victorious.  Methinks there might be some noble failure in the air.

Expedition Africa

A bold recreation of HM Stanley’s traipse through Africa in search of Dr Livingstone.  History Channel, Thursday 21:00
3 Americans and 1 Brit.
3 Chaps 1 girl
3 experienced adventurers 1 novice.
3 sane 1 idiot.
Interestingly each person in the group gets to be the minority instance only once.
I was looking forward to this mightily having read a good deal about Stanley after my non-classical education had left me lacking in things interesting to think about.

The Brit is perhaps my favourite explorer, Benedict Allen.  The Mr Magoo of exploration, he just “keeps it real” and I mean both as complements.   He was my first introduction to “alpine style” TV exploration.  Just him and a camera at arms length, Les Stroud perhaps being the more well known, but he approaches things in a different manner.

Benedict Allen is more a writer of books who happens to have a camera.  His explorations are often calamitous, rocketing to popular fame by eating his dog in one particularly unfortunate expedition.

I remember reading/hearing his publicist gets the blame for the Indiana Jones hat which seems to be welded to his head, but our Benedict seems to spend far too much time in it for a mere publicity stunt.

The 4 team members are well chosen (if you want conflict and probably in today’s TV it’s exactly what they want).

Pasquale is the nominal leader.  He will not fail to remind you he is the leader at every opportunity in that peculiar way of mouthing words he has, his upper lip goes up and down like a portcullis.

Benedict and Pasquale are always at loggerheads.  Perhaps it is because I am English I side with Benedict here.  If you are crossing an arid wasteland zooming ahead and losing sight of your water supply being carried by a rather dodgy looking donkey does not seem a good plan of action.

For Pasquale it seems the donkey and water are just distractions from the real business of getting from A to B as fast as possible and if a few people die of heat stroke along the way and the rest die of dehydration it’s but a small price to pay for such ripping speed.
In the latest episode the team of 4 have rather split into 2 teams of 2.

Pasquale has a supporter in the shape of an American journalist who has very little experience in such adventure.  A rather painful character that has over-identified with the native porters (these people with heavy bundles on their heads are the actual backbone of the expedition, this is no lightweight jaunt, this is siege mode travel).

Whenever this journo opens his maw something along the lines of “We have to consider the porters” drops out.

Often though the word “me” would appear to be interchangeable with the word “porter”.  The whole porter thing seems to be something by which he projects his own anxiety.

With Benedict is the woman in the team.  She brings increased ratings and presumably woman-le-ness to proceedings.  She is an expert on things creepy-crawly which so far has limited her to saying “watch out that snake is poisonous”.  I certainly would need an expert to point this out to me otherwise its possible to confuse it with the other sort of snake you run up to and hug affectionately.

Part Six is coming up tonight, Benedict is going to have a brush with Malaria, this puts the whole project in jeopardy in more ways than one.

"Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from."

Pink Floyd runs through my life and for the last 20 years the memory associations with the work has meant I simply cannot listen to it anymore.

When I first listened to that lyric from Nobodys Home, The Wall, it seemed improbable to me with a mere 3 channels that you could have 13 channels of TV and there being nothing to watch.

Well, live long enough and you will see everything.

I must have choice of well over 100 channels (never been bored enough to count them and I hope I have the strength of character to blown my own brains out before I do) and its come more than true. If only it was limited to 13 channels of shit but they are all infected with it to a greater or lesser extent and often simultaneously.

Firstly I dont have long enough left on this earth to do all the things I wish to do so the idea of spending 20minutes or more of every hour watching adverts for crap i dont need/want or cannot afford is just too grim to contemplate. Then add the opening and closing credits add to the misery of it all. And recently the growing tendency to give you a recap at the beginning of each segment the feeling you are simply pissing your life away grows.

My initial reaction to this was simply multi-task, ie have the TV on and do something else. All this meant was I did not see the program I thought I wished to watch while also breaking my concentration with regard the other activity.

My latest battle against the banal is record everything I wish to watch and skip the adverts title sequences and all the other sawdust and packing which seems to go into making a TV prog nowadays.

One interesting side effect of this is, it would appear I did not want to watch it in the first place.

Despite an ever growing DVD hard-drive I dont seem to have time spare to even watch versions of the programs I can strip of its shit.

This really is just an extension of my "Jardine" moment and the ever increasing desire to lighten and simplify.